


shaking through my skull, through my spine, and down through my ribs

by passeridae



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Character Study, Gen, Pre-Season/Series 05, Seizures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:06:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26373949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/passeridae/pseuds/passeridae
Summary: He has his first seizure three months in, after he starts Knowing.(short "what if" scenario, where Jon's transformation into The Archivist is not without side effects)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 95





	shaking through my skull, through my spine, and down through my ribs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [besselfcn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/gifts).



> For Lee, who has poisoned me <3

He has his first seizure three months in, after he starts Knowing ( _exactly three months, two weeks, two days, eleven hours and—_ stop, no. It doesn’t listen to stop, but it feels good to say it all the same). He tries anticonvulsants, which make him sleepy and blur his vision until he can barely read. Then antiepileptics, which make him dizzy and have him taking five naps a day on the cot in the office. 

Just like when he was a teen, trying all the antidepressants under the sun, he can’t tolerate the side effects anywhere near well enough to justify the reduction in seizure frequency. And it is just that — a reduction, not cessation. Even at dangerously high doses, they don’t stop. He can’t stop Knowing. Turns out seizures caused by knowledge being poured directly into your brain aren’t covered under the NHS. Who'd've thought.

You see, it turns out that human brains can't take the kind of strain that his has been put under. They're only meat after all ( _false: they're approximately nine pounds of fatty tissue with exceedingly high electrical conductivity, trapped in a cage of bone, mostly calcium unless you have radium poisoning in which case..._ ), and neurons can only cope with so much electricity being channeled through them before they stop entirely. Like a runner sprinting then needing to sit on a park bench for a breather before they continue their morning jog. Out of breath and exhausted and aching, and he’s always hated jogging, could never understand why people did it. He’d much rather be reading, or puzzling his way through a broken system, crafting order from chaos — but of course that’s what got him into this situation in the first place, isn’t it.

The Eye is changing him, he knows this, he Knows it ( _tweaking neuronal conduction limits, playing with the molecular makeup of neurotransmitters, altering neural pathways so that knowledge travels faster. The Eye knows how to do that easy as breathing and have you thought about your lungs lately? Wilfred Owen thought about lungs a lot, near the end, straining, stained red, ripped to frothy shreds by gas, burbling like a brook and the sense-memory of suffocating in his own body aches like drowning, but that pain is still less than the terror of The Slaughter come to take him_ ). 

The Eye is changing him, into something else, something more than just Jon. Something it refuses to let him know, just yet, or perhaps he shies away from that question himself because he’s worried that the breadth of the knowledge involved in the answer may kill him outright. But either way, his brain hasn't got the memo of this change yet, is still so limited, trapping him in the confines of so much meat, but not for much longer he Knows.

That eventual change doesn't stop it from giving up the ghost in the meantime, though (ha, a paranormal investigation pun, Melanie would like that _just like she likes when Georgie makes her coffee and a fryup in the morning, one of the routines Georgie introduced into her life when she realised surgically removed fear meant it was easy to forget that others, other people, fear partners losing interest and a lack of seemingly spontaneous—_ NO).

Martin finds him shivering on the floor, because of course he does. It's not the first time. Jon would think he’d traded parts of himself to The Eye too, if he didn’t Know better. It's only temporary, Jon tells him, teeth still chattering in his jaw. It will improve. He Knows.

Martin purses his lips but says nothing, puts him to bed, makes him tea. He knows, too. He just hates it.


End file.
